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How have critics reassessed T.S. Eliot’s views on culture, race, and Jewish people?

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T.S. Eliot stands at a chalkboard, writing a diagram with letters and Greek symbols representing characters for a play, in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study. — T.S. Eliot T.S. Eliot working on his play *The Cocktail Party* in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, 1948. The letters of the alphabet in his diagram represent characters in the play. The Greek letters represent characters yet to be invented.

Since T.S. Eliot’s death, literary scholars have moved away from the largely sympathetic exegesis that defined his lifetime, instead subjecting his work and legacy to rigorous critical scrutiny. Contemporary interpreters have focused on his elitist social and cultural views, as well as his exclusivist notions regarding race.1

A significant portion of this reassessment centers on Eliot’s treatment of Jewish people and his use of antisemitic language in his poetry, specifically citing works such as “Gerontion” and “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”. While Eliot remains recognized for his monumental impact on 20th-century literature and his command of modern poetic language, his legacy is now frequently characterized as problematic. This shift in perspective coincides with a broader academic challenge to the critical precepts and formalist approaches that Eliot helped establish, reflecting a modern commitment to examining the social and moral implications of a writer's work alongside its aesthetic achievements.12